# The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

DevFeed: [The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded-31368.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixpkgs-core-team-has-disbanded/79413>)

Author: qyliss

Published: 2026-08-07T21:39:34Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Announcements - NixOS Discourse](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/announcements-nixos-discourse.md>)

Topics: [Maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/maintainers.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>)

Tags: [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [governance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/governance.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [maintainers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/maintainers.md>), [nixpkgs-core-team](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/nixpkgs-core-team.md>)

## AI overview

The Nixpkgs core team announces its dissolution, citing an unsustainable workload, attrition, insufficient recruitment, and governance and communication problems with the Steering Committee. The team also describes work completed during its 10-month tenure.

## Source excerpt

The Nixpkgs core team has unfortunately decided to disband. We're proud to have had the opportunity to lead by example in bottom-up, consensus-focused governance for Nixpkgs, and of our achievements over the past 10 months, including reforming the committer delegation process and onboarding 19 new committers, empowering maintainers by extending the merge bot, re-establishing contact with GitHub and securing the sponsored Enterprise Cloud upgrade, helping triage GHSA-67f2-674w-6g63 and track the GitHub security risks exposed by that incident, and establishing an initial automation/AI policy, as well as helping resolve many incidents that were escalated to us. However, it has sadly not turned out to be the lightweight role compatible with active technical contribution that we had originally hoped it would be, and two weeks ago we reached the conclusion that stepping down is necessary for our health. We believe that it's unsustainable for the team to continue, as demonstrated in part by our attrition to date. With only one person actively applying in response to our call for new members and mixed response to outreach, recruiting sufficiently to keep things healthy looks untenable. Therefore, especially with a Steering Committee election due imminently, we think the best way forward for Nixpkgs governance is to be honest about the circumstances that have made dissolving the team unavoidable, in the hopes that it may help future efforts. Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself. This manifests as unnecessary micromanagement of teams below them and chronically poor communication, including lack of clarity from SC members about when they're speaking for themselves or representing a joint position, matters brought to our attention with desired outcomes already attached,